Importance of AMD TrueAudio in Thief explained by Eidos Montreal

We saw the premiere trailer for upcoming strategy action first person 3D game 'Thief' in April last year. As a stealthy game the awareness of sound, the environment and use of silence are key to gameplay so what better game for AMD to enhance with its new TrueAudio Technology? The game is due out this year and publishers Square Enix were at the CES demonstrating the title, being developed at Eidos Montreal.

AMD interviewed Jean-Normand Bucci, Technical Art Director, Square Enix who confirmed that audio is "taken very seriously," within the upcoming Thief game coming to PCs, current and next gen consoles this year. He explained that the sound in the game is used for immersion and for "many different gameplay aspects".

Sound design considerations in Thief include; sound to distract guards and different surfaces in the game exhibiting different sound characteristics – this is part of the core game design. The developers have worked to create "more realistic sound environments in different areas".

All this is good but the audio processing required can cause CPU overheads for the many and complex calculations required which also require a lot of RAM, explained Bucci. However, if you have an AMD GPU with TrueAudio it will be able to handle all these overheads he said, which should mean that the game can run smoother with your CPU and RAM devoted to the other non-audio, non-graphical gaming calculations without hindrance.

More information about AMD TrueAudio technology can be found on AMD's site here.

shaithisCan't see any info about what cards are supported by this new audio mode....

Also, no mention of mantle, i'd like to think they were going to push technologies together......

Now awaiting the first title with TrueAudio and/or Mantle with physx support.....just to cause ultimate confusion.

I remember that there's an article on anandtech somewhere which said which cards had it.

Bit silly, considering this existed for ages with Creative cards then due to various forces, including the vista/7 sound stack and Creative's incompetence that it's taken a graphics company to redo 3d audio again.

kalnielKind of needs to go with mantle to be honest, because at the moment we've got so much spare CPU hanging around there's no need to accelerate audio.

erm ... Mantle will also reduce CPU load. Mantle + TrueAudio means we can probably all go back to Pentium 4s ;) Or more to the point, Mantle + TrueAudio means AMDs low end APUs will shine in games that use them both, as they won't need anywhere near as much CPU power. Mobile Kaveri, I'm looking at you... ;)